Yeonmi Park - While Time Remains: A North Korean Defectors Search for Freedom in America

Foreword by Jordan B. Peterson

While Time Remains

Author of In Order to Live

Yeonmi Park

A North Korean Defectors Search for Freedom in America

Yeonmi-ya,

tigers leave behind a coat,

and men leave behind a name;

make yours good and lasting.

MY FATHER

I f the hypothetical moralism of the Left had any grounding in reality, it would be hard to imagine anyone who those of that political stripe would celebrate more than Ms. Yeonmi Park, who escaped with little more than her skin and bones from the tender mercies of the brutal North Korean regime. She has everything the heroic victim (hypothetically) requires: all the intersectional virtues. She is an immigrant, and female; someone who had been subject to truly dreadful abuse from someone truly tyrannical (and from the government agents at his familys diabolical disposal); she was genuinely starved; she was enslavedalong with her mother, literally bought and soldand exploited sexually, at a very young age.

Her education as a young girl consisted of little more than the propagandistic glorification of her persecutors; subjugation to the lies they told (and constantly) about everyone else everywhere in the worldincluding the explicit demonization of Americans, blamed continually for the utter catastrophic failure that North Korea clearly and irrefutably constitutes. Park emerged from all that, and worse, to become a voice of freedom; to become someone who not only talked about speaking truth to power but actually did so; to become, despite her relative and starvation-induced frailty, a true thorn in the side of one of the worst dictatorships the world has ever managed to produce.

In that respect, she is reminiscent of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another woman whom I thought in my initial ignorance, years ago, would be a positive darling of every feminist worth her salt in the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: another woman, another immigrant, a victim of female genital mutilation; someone whom, with extraordinary bravery, dared to face down the authoritarian religious hypocrites who wished to doom her to a life of unquestioning subordination and obedience. Her reward? She was, not least, identified as an anti-Muslim extremist by the Field Guide to such individuals published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an appallingly self-righteous and utterly hypocritical leftist organizationa group of lawyers purporting to serve as a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people, and employing all the reprehensible clanging idiot-jargon of the radical narcissists of compassion to do so. However, because Ali had the gall not to toe the party line and trumpet the evils of the capitalist West (quite the contrary: she regards the West as exceptionally admirable, particularly in comparative terms), she is persona non grata on the Left.

There is no one more annoying to the ideological activists of the radical Left than a minority woman who doesnt know her proper political place; no one more irritating than someone whom, according to the dictates of that God-forsaken jargon-ridden conceptual scheme, has internalized their oppression, and who therefore stands up for the hypothetical enemy, which must always and invariably be, by the standards of the pseudo-illuminated puritans in question, the West, the West, the West.

Thus, Ms. Park has been subject to treatment very similar to that which befell Ali, although arguably even more extensively. She employed her YouTube channel to draw attention to the plight of the North Koreans, particularly the women who experienced the same horrors that befell her and her mother. She pointed out, with all due accuracy, the utter complicity of the damned Chinese Communist Party in supporting that appalling, tyrannical regimeallowing the continued slave-trading of North Korean women in China, and using the cruel, genocidal, and megalomaniac Kim dynasty as a convenient and nuclear-armed goad to prod and threaten the West. And that regime poses no mean threat: North Koreas military is the fourth largest in the world and is nuclear armed. Furthermore, as Ms. Park points out, the anti-American rhetoric employed by the Kim familys nest of devils is ultimately inflammatory, in the most atomic of manners: North Korean schoolchildren are taught that the total destruction of American cities by the very weapons just described is something not only fully justified but to be devoutly desired. YouTubes response? The demonetization of Yeonmis channelnot once, but repeatedly, with no explanation. Remember Dont be evil? The much-paraded motto of the very Google that now owns YouTube? Remember when that motto was scrapped? Every wonder why? Look no further than the pathetic kowtowing to the Chinese overlords that characterizes such behavior and derive your own conclusions.

If the Cinderella story had been written by someone much grimmer than the Brothers Grimm, the star could well be the author of the current book. After escaping from the utter prison of North Korea; after surviving the sex slavery imposed on her (and her mother, simultaneously) in China; after educating herself in an absolutely unlikely manner in South Korea, she made her way to the United States, and enrolled in Columbia University, a once-great beacon of Western freedom. To say that this was the dream of a lifetime is to radically overstate the case; this was something undreamed of, something outside the realm of all reasonable possibility. Ms. Park, guided by the spirit of her entrepreneurial father, truly valued educationhad endeavoured in all ways to educate herself as thoroughly as possible, in the traditional sense, when she managed to make her way to South Korea, where she pored over, among other works, the books of the great George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984.

And what happened when she entered the hallowed halls of that august institution of higher education?

She encountered the same ideology that had corrupted her homeland and doomed its inhabitants to a life in hell. Of course, it was America: it was Totalitarianism Lite, offered, as all such things are in this over-coddled and narcissistic time, as a convenient fashion statement; a faux identity; a means of parading unearned moral virtue while biding time as an oppressor-in-trainingthe inevitable and truly desired fate of every virtue-signaling Ivy League graduate. She was upbraided by her pathetic professors for daring to admire Jane Austen, whose books promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy and propagate the idea that women are inferior to men; that only white males are fully evolved and capable of higher-level thinking; that salvation is only achievable through the dogma of Christianity (of course; or else). And Yeonmi learned that she better think and feel that wayeven when listening to Western classical music (or else). There was nothing more unacceptable at Columbia than to be a SIX HIRB: a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot.

Yeonmi Park grew up in a totalitarian nightmare. As a child, she roasted and consumed insects to survive, when she could find them. As someone from a poor family (and that genuinely meant poor in North Korea) she had to bring five rabbit pelts to class and hand them over to maintain any social standing whatsoever with the propagandists who passed as teachers. She grew up among people whose dying wish was meat stew and rice. She was subject to the worst dictatorship on the planetmaybe the worst dictatorship ever promulgated, although the competition for that vaunted position is very fierce. She came to the US, miraculously, and encountered fools dallying with the same ideas that had made her life something almost unbelievably harshcertainly that, by Western standards. She attempted with all her heart, as she is doing in the present volume, to warn us here in our luxury and comfort not to fall prey to the same ideological temptations that doomed the Soviet Union and all its satellites and that still possess the billion-plus people in China, much to the detriment of that countrys beleaguered citizens and the rest of the world. Who led the rush to lockdown? China. Who copied the actions of that terrible state?